The present invention relates to cellular phones and more particularly to a dialing method for effecting international calls in an intelligent cellular phone.
Cellular phones have been popular worldwide in recent years due to their portability, versatility, and inexpensive unit prices, as a communication device for social or business purpose. Further, as compared to conventional wire telephones, cellular phones have advantages in certain fields such as convenience in an outdoor environment and portability. However, the functionalities of cellular phones have not been perfect. For example, a telephone number stored in a phone book of a cellular phone is not available if the international access code of a location area in which a phone call is made is different from that preset in the phone book by the user. In the example of international roaming, a successful cellular phone call is made possible only after a user knows the international access code, national code, area code and numbers of a telephone of a called party in advance i.e., the user has to dial the international access code, national code, area code and numbers sequentially. In view of the above, the international call made by cellular phone is not convenient. In another case of making conversations with several people located in different countries, the searching process for corresponding international access codes and operation thereof are even more complex and time consuming. This really bothers cellular phone users, thus causing inconvenience. Hence, there is a need to solve the above problems associated with international calls made by cellular phones. Moreover, it is desirable to provide a novel cellular phone which can perform a dialing method for effecting international calls in a convenient effective manner in order to overcome the above drawbacks of the prior art.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a dialing method for effecting an international call in an intelligent cellular phone comprising the steps of storing system codes of a plurality of network companies worldwide and their international access codes in a conversion table in a database of a memory of the cellular phone, and storing a plurality of telephone numbers of different called parties in a phone book in the database; searching for a telephone number stored in the phone book according to the name of a called party to be dialed; determining whether a system code received from a telephone company in the location area of calling this telephone number is different from the system code stored in the phone book; If different, accessing a revision table and searching for the international access code corresponding to the system code in the telephone number retrieved from the phone book by the international access code retrieved from the revision table in accordance with the system code received from the local telephone company in the calling location area; and automatically dialing the telephone number having a correct international access code. This is a convenient and practical design.